Okay.... At the very beginning of september (a few days before I got run over), I bought a whole ton of super-trick hardware to build a dual tualatin server for VectorStar. It all came in, and it ran fine in single-processor mode, but when both processors were installed, it just wouldn't POST. My intention was to return the board for replacement (bought off ebay, so it's not like i had a warranty)... but I got run over. The new server idea just sat as pieces for a while.

So I finally broke down and bought a second Tyan Thunder LE-T S2518 motherboard (which is one bad mother, if you aren't up on your low-pro, rackmount multiprocessor server boards). It came in today. Problem is that it wasn't an S2518 - it was its older cousin, the S2510, that supports everything except for the new multiprocessor spec that was invented solely for the Tualatins' tighter voltage tolerances. My luck with trying to build servers for VectorStar continues to suck!

Some day we'll actually get everything back up to 100% and some day I'll actually have time to finish writing the admin system and some day we'll have a fully-collaborative message board and some day we'll have our own IRC server... some day. In reality all this will happen when I stop working for employers that work me as if they're holding the "no-green-card blackmail" over my head and then blame their own follies and inexcusably poor planning on me. Yeah, 4 years since the start of the message board and all comes full circle.

Re: The luck just keeps on coming

2003-12-30 23:10:47by lmbedore

So it turns out I needed to do my homework on the Tualatins- not all stepping revisions are SMP-friendly, and the chips I got fall right into the single-processor-only group. Chances are that the first board I got works just fine with two processors! I ordered two matching PIII 800EB's (cause they're way way way cheaper than matching dual-capable tualatins) for the time being (it's not like we're actually going to tax the server, after all) and hoping to replace the S2510 with an actual S2518. Once that all works out and settles down, we'll have an extra S2518 board and at some point I might get Tualatins for that one. Or just keep it around for a rainy day or something. Once this server is halfway built, I'm going to spend some time making an Apache 2.0x build that meets our needs and then swap it in place of Angstful. Then I'll use Angstful to create a newer-version replica of Chester (I've got a few new tricks to make the mail system a little better, and an OS upgrade is always nice), get it all running solid, and then just swap the hard drives and RAID controller in chester one night (Goodbye Promise FastTrak, Hello 3ware Escalade!). In a couple months (cause you know we're not timely people), all the servers of importance will be running 3ware RAID cards and will be remotely monitorable, will notify us in the case of failure and will actually be fast (unlike those Promise cards).

Oh, and it was the VRM spec (8.5) that was updated to accomodate the Tualatin chips. Damn, i'm slackin!